"SMOG IN DFW"

END OF THE 2016 OZONE SEASON: 

ALL-STAR UPDATE AND DISCUSSION

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27th

6-8 PM

DREAM CAFE @THE QUADRANGLE

2800 ROUTH STREET #170 DALLAS  (map)

THE FEATURED EARTH DAY TEXAS

EDMO EVENT FOR OCTOBER 

PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE: 

DALLAS CITY COUNCILWOMAN SANDY GREYSON

FORMER DALLAS COUNTY JUDGE MARGARET KELIHER

DR. ROBERT HALEY, TOXICOLOGIST, UT SOUTHWESTERN

DR. DAVID LARY, ATMOSPHERIC CHEMIST, UT AT DALLAS

DOWNWINDERS AT RISK DIRECTOR JIM SCHERMBECK

MODERATED BY RANDY LEE LOFTIS, TEXAS CLIMATE NEWS 

Despite five clean air plans written by the state and EPA, DFW has been in continuous violation of the Clean Air Act for smog since 1991.

The current state clean air plan for DFW has one more summer to "attain" the federal ozone standard of 75 parts per billion. We're at a regional average of 80 ppb, down exactly 1 ppb from 2015 levels. The region has never had a one-year 5 ppb drop in smog before.

If the state plan does fail next year, what happens? 

Meanwhile, advancements in technology are making it possible for citizens to use increasingly sophisticated tools previously available only to government or industry in their fights for cleaner air.

How much of government's air quality watchdog role can now be assumed by citizens, and should be? 

Attention DFW Citizen Scientists and Interested Folk!!

Check out UTD's fleet of drones used for air monitoring and talk to the scientists who use them.

See the "real time results" "dashboard" UNT is developing to pair with these drones.

Meet our academic partners in establishing a grassroots air network better than anything government is doing.

$35 gets you all this, a drink and some food.

Spend the evening getting all cyberized.

TICKETS CAN BE PURCHASED ONLINE HERE: 

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/keep-em-flying-launch-of-the-n…

11 AM 

THIS FRIDAY, SEPT 2nd 

ENERGY TRANSFER HQ

8111 WESTCHESTER in DALLAS – by the N. Dallas Tollroad (map)

The American Indian Movement of Central Texas is sponsoring a protest in support of the increasingly high profile anti- pipeline protest in the Dakota Indian Country in Dallas this Friday. The event is co-sponsored by a host of local and state environmental groups, including Downwinders at Risk. 

If built, the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL), would pass under the Missouri River…twice. The pipeline threatens to contaminate the drinking water, crops and burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. 

Federal regulatory agencies quietly approved DAPL, which will transport Bakkan Shale crude oil from North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois.

The Dallas connection? Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners is the pipeline's developer. 

You may already know Energy Transfer's CEO, Kelcy Warren. He bought the naming rights to the Dallas Deck park over Woodall Rogers that bears his son's name and is a big Jackson Browne fan. Show up and protest Before The Deluge. 

In yet another shift away from the state's monopoly on air quality information, breathers in North Texas won't have to rely on the Austin-designed system of local air monitoring much longer.

On Sunday, Downwinders at Risk won its category in the Earth Tank competition at Earth Day Texas and brought home $3000 to buy a drone the group will modify to perform its own air DFW sampling and monitoring operations.

Working with the TCU engineering department, Downwinders will use the money to purchase a heavy-duty consumer drone and outfit it with small air pollution sensors and sampling equipment that work in concert with smart phones and laptops. The result will be an instrument able to give citizens and scientists real time information about air pollution.

As far as we know, we'll be the first group in the state to have this kind of capability.

Our presentation on Sunday made the case that the current DFW air monitoring network run by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality gives an incomplete picture of air pollution threats in DFW. Both the limited number of air monitors and their immobility were cited as faults that could be depriving residents of a fuller, more accurate picture of DFW's chronic air pollution problems. Our answer was an air sampling drone that could go practically anywhere at anytime and sample for many different pollutants depending on what's being monitored. 

One of the examples we used was Wise County, which is the most recent addition to the DFW 'non-attainment area" for smog. Despite it now being a part of the regulated smog zone, and despite the fact repeated computer air modeling by the state shows the highest smog levels in the region could be found there, Wise County has no smog monitors. Not a one.

Austin knows if it puts a new monitor is Wise County, DFW's annual smog average might go up even higher than it is now, and so the TCEQ has treated the County like it's not there. 

Downwinders' drone will be able to show-up in Wise County on "ozone action days" and actually take real time measurements of smog for evidence demonstrating the need for an official monitor. TCEQ already hates this idea. 

We'll also be able to do things like take methane readings over the gas patch, montior the plumes at accident sites (think the Magnablend catastrophe in Waxahachie a few years ago), and carry out experiments and research projects for area scientists – all the things TCEQ should be doing, but isn't. 

This new tool allows us to enter into colaborations with other groups, local governments, and university programs. It's a teaching device we can take to schools. It can back-up citizen complaints. The uses are many.

But as we told the panel of judges on Sunday, our real "killer app" is not the drone itself, but the organization of people we put in place to operate it and decide how to use it.

Dr. Michael Slattery of the TCU Institute of Environmental Studies will head a group of researchers, technicians, and citizens who will assess projects, train drone pilots, and help administer "The North Texas Clean Air Force."  Downwinders at Risk board member and Mansfield fracking activist Tamera Bounds has already signed-up. "I can't wait to learn how to fly that thing." 

With the creation of this group, we'll be establishing a parrallel air quality monitoring program that once again opens up a previoulsy closed black box in Austin to citizen use. Just last November, we unveiled our DFW Ozone Study that, for the first time ever, took the state's own computer air model for DFW, cloned it, and had it do things the state did not want done – like tell us how much less smog would be breathed in DFW if you put modern controls on the largest industrial polluters.

In taking on these responsibilities which have tradtionally fallen to the state, our goal is not only to provide valuable new tools to citizens, but build new structures of decision-making about air quality that puts citizens in charge. For us, it's as important to change the way we make decisions as it is to add to the scientific literature, or bring smog levels down. It's right there in our mission statement,

Our goal is to build a strong grassroots constituency and create new strategies for clean air in North Texas.  

We do this by informing, connecting and mobilizing citizens to become active participants in the decision-making that affects the air we breathe. 

In doing so, we improve both the quality of our air and the quality of our democracy.”

We still have a lot of research to do, a lot of mistakes to make, a lot of experience to absorb, but creation and operation of a North Texas Clean AIr Force is one more step to building the kind of citizens' self-defense system necessary when your state government abdicates its job of public health protector.

Now, because the state's monopoly on data is crumbling with each new advancement in micro-processing, we're willing and able to step into this vacuum of leadership. Our goal is not only taking over the jobs Austin isn't doing, but creating a more citizen-friendly way of doing those jobs. 

Move over TCEQ, the North Texas Clean Air Force is about to take off. 

Release from Dallas County Commissioner Theresa Daniel's office today at 3:30 pm

Officials Seek EPA Help in

Clean-Up of DFW Smog

Rep. Johnson and Veasey send letter to Agency chief;

Commissioner Daniel puts resolution on May 3^rd

Dallas County Court agenda, say “more

progress needed” than current 

state air plan delivers.

(Dallas)— In an unprecedented coordination of local and congressional action on air quality, elected officials announced they were formally asking for the EPA’s help in producing a better plan to clean up DFW’s chronic smog, now in its third decade of violating the Clean Air Act.

In Washington, Dallas Representatives Eddie Bernice Johnson and Marc Veasey released the contents of an April 19th letter they sent EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, citing the Agency’s own public comments, and calling the state's current plan for addressing air quality in DFW ‘insufficient to meet the existing federal ozone standard.”

“We ask you to consider rejecting the state’s plan and the use of a Federal Implementation Plan if your agency decides that the final SIP revision is insufficient.”

In Dallas, County Commissioner Theresa Daniel has put a resolution on the Court’s May 3^rd agenda that urges the EPA “to reject the proposed State Implementation Plan for DFW ozone pollution, and require a new federal DFW clean air plan that can meet or exceed the current 75 ppb federal ozone standard…"

Daniel’s resolution also requests the EPA to “regulate East Texas coal plants as if they were in the DFW non-attainment area, or include them in a larger non-attainment area for North Texas under rules governing the new federal 70 ppb ozone standard.”

“What’s at stake is the last opportunity to take a coordinated regional approach to reducing air pollution until at least 2021,” said Daniel, who’s been helping oversee a local air quality research project produced by the UNT Engineering Department. “After decades of being in violation of the Clean Air Act, we need more and faster progress to solve this serious public health issue costing us lives and dollars every year”

What Daniel and the Representatives are seeking is an official EPA rejection of an anti-smog  plan for DFW and surrounding counties already passed by the state and on its way to EPA. The plan provides for no cuts in pollution from any major sources in North Texas, relying instead on a coming 2017 nationwide federal mandate that will reduce smog-forming pollution from traffic.

Because its contents are well known and a public comment period has passed, EPA’s skepticism of the state’s plan is on the record.  The Agency’s conclusion that the plan needs some 100-200 tons a day more in additional air pollution cuts to attain the necessary drop in smog is used in the congressional letter calling for federal intervention. Daniel’s resolution also cites the EPA’s comments as one of the reasons the region needs to reject the state plan and draft a better one.

Although unprecedented in the long history of DFW air quality planning, the officials’ request follows on the heels of a similar resolution passed by the Texas Medical Association last year., spurred on by local Dallas County doctors who’ve been speaking out about the health dangers of DFW’s continuing smog problem. Many of those same doctors say they’ll be present on the 3^rd to voice their support for Daniel’s resolution and praise Johnson and Veasey for taking the lead in Washington.

“Evidence is overwhelming that our high ozone levels are causing increasing numbers of area children to develop asthma, and are contributing to the many asthma attacks, chronic lung disease exacerbations, and heart attacks we see every day in our emergency rooms, clinics and hospitals,” said Robert Haley, MD, a Dallas internist and epidemiologist. “A large body of medical research shows that more people of all ages develop respiratory illnesses and die prematurely in cities with high ozone levels, and we have among the highest ozone levels in the country.”

On Wednesday the American Lung Association issued its annual “State of the Air” report and once again gave the Dallas-Fort Worth area an “F” for air quality. Although the number of dirty air days and their severity has fallen over the years, the region is still not in compliance with the Clean Air Act.

Daniel cited the new report as one more reason she, Johnson, and Veasey have to take action now. “This is the only opportunity until the next decade to get a better clean air plan for North Texas.  If we don’t take the right steps in 2016, we’ll still be getting an “F” in 2026.”

__________________________________________________________________________________

A Public Hearing about the Air YOU Breathe

Thursday, January 21st
Public Comment begins at 6:30 pm
616 Six Flags Road, Arlington

(HQ of the North Central Texas Council of Governments)        

Only an hour after a public plea to EPA by local residents to rescue them from the state's laissez-faire enforcement of environmental laws, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality proved the protesters' point at last Friday's regional air quality meeting by announcing a bigger gap between the current federal smog standard and the Commission's anti-smog plan supposedly designed to meet that standard in DFW.

The goal is to average 75 parts per billion (ppb) or less of ozone in the air over any single eight hour period at all 20 DFW monitors by 2017, per a court order that rolled the deadline back from 2018. DFW is at 83 ppb now. TCEQ announced its latest estimates have DFW clocking-in a best case scenario of 77.8 parts per billion by the end of 2017.

But don't worry, because TCEQ says that's still "close enough" to 75 to count as a bulls-eye. 

One wonders what would happen if this kind of precision was practiced in other critical fields. Your surgeon mistakes your Thoracic Aorta for the Abdominal Aorta? Understandable, they both start with "A." Bank statement off by a decimal point or two? Surely not enough of a change to worry about.

And is a jump of almost two parts per billion in regional smog over the last estimate any reason for perhaps considering new smog controls for major sources of pollution, like, say, cement plants, coal plants, or oil and gas sources? Nope, says TCEQ. No need to inconvenience those industries because of some little ol' public health harms that we as a state agency have been trying to downplay and deny for years now. 

"2 to 3 parts per billion here, 2 to 3 parts per billion there  – what's the difference" TCEQ asks? "We'll throw in things the EPA can't possibly quantify – like 'sustainable building' and 'bicycle paths' and Viola! we'll get down to "77" ppb in two years with no problems…somehow. That's within the margin of error – that we always blow past. We've always relied on this tried and true approach of aiming low and we've had great success so far, we're 0 for 5 in reaching attainment on time over the last two decades."

Co-facilitating this charade to some extent is EPA itself, which still allows state governments to round DOWN 77.8 to 77, knocking off almost a whole part per billion in TCEQ's always-sunny scenario on paper, if not in the actual atmosphere of 2018, where it counts more. 

Particularly galling about the state's lackadaisical approach to meeting the current 75 standard is that it comes at a time when we know that number is still too high to adequately protect public health. EPA has just proposed lowering it to 70 ppb based on an overwhelming amount of evidence. Instead of a smog plan that always seems to come in two to three parts per billion over the standard, how about we draft one that comes in at one to three parts per billion under the standard? One that anticipates the need to get even cleaner air in the future and gives us a running start?

As it turns out, we have fresh evidence, provided by the state's own computer model, that requiring off-the-shelf modern pollution controls on those cement kilns, coal plants, and oil and gas facilities could lower DFW regional smog by at least one to two parts per billion, putting us in a much more likely position to actually meet the smog standard. TCEQ looks at this result, wrinkles up its collective nose and says its only a one or two parts per billion change. To which the logical reply is: "OK, show us how you get down closer to 75 ppb without cuts in emissions from those major sources."

Crickets.

Because of course, TCEQ has no alternative, no Plan B, no way to get down to the 75 ppb standard that involves doing something. It isn't invested in that goal. As its website explains, the Commission's "customers" are the industries seeking its permits. Many of those customers are very upset at the mean ol' EPA for following the Clean Air Act. And the customer is always right. 

So TCEQ drafts a customer-friendly clean air plan for DFW with no controls on any major sources, makes a new federal gasoline mix do most of the work in the computer model, and (theoretically) crosses the finish line at three parts per billion over the standard. See how hard they tried?

The last time TCEQ tried as hard was the 2011 DFW clean air plan. That "do-nothing" plan was predicted by the state to take us to historically low smog levels because so many more new cars were going to be purchased – during the Great Recession. All we had to do was sit back and watch those babies fly off the lots!

It was the first DFW clean air plan in 20 years to actually produce higher smog levels.

First, but maybe not the last. Regional smog averages rose twice this summer – the first of three that make up a running annual average determining success or failure of the TCEQ plan by 2017. How do you know when a TCEQ clean air plan is being implemented? Smog goes up. 

EPA's own modeling is already predicting TCEQ's current  "do-nothing" plan won't work, and concludes DFW will be one of only a hand full of metropolitan areas still breathing unsafe and illegal air ten years from now.

In point of fact, no matter how many parts per billion, no gap would be wide enough for TCEQ to find cause for more pollution controls on major sources. They've rigged the game to produce a result they hope allows them to slide by and get EPA approval. It's our responsibility to make sure EPA doesn't give it.  

Texas state government has no intention of trying to meet the federal smog standard. It has every intention of dragging out the process so it's unwillingness to implement measures to meet it are obscured by more deadline failures and new Designed-to-Fail plans from Austin. It is a never-ending cycle there's no escape from as long as TCEQ is in charge. Expecting Texas to vigorously enforce environmental laws in 2015 is like expecting Mississippi to enforce federal civil rights law in 1965.

That's why it's important for EPA to takeover the job.

Is it a perfect solution? No, but it's one with a beginning, middle and end, carried out by an agency that still officially believes smog is a public health threat.

PLEASE…sign the petition for a real clean air plan from EPA

AND

PLEASE…send an e-mail to the regional and national EPA Administrators saying you want them to take over the job of writing a clean air plan for DFW.

Only we can prevent another twenty years of dirty air.